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Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Tatyana Ali revealed new details about her traumatic experience giving birth to her first son in 2016.
The actress recalled undergoing an emergency C-section after doctors “pushed him back inside me” and held her down for hours.
“It’s an incredibly dangerous thing that they did,” she said. “They could have snapped his neck.”
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air alum and pregnancy healthcare activist Tatyana Ali is speaking out about her traumatic experience giving birth to her first child.
The actress, 47, recently recalled undergoing an emergency C-section after doctors pushed her crowning baby back into her body.
“I had a really healthy pregnancy, luckily,” she said, referencing her son Edward, on the latest episode of Pod Meets World. However, she added, “All of that changed once we got into the hospital. Our birth plan wasn’t followed … But I was also held down. I was held down, my arms and legs.”
Vaughn Rasberry, Edward Aszard Rasberry, and Tatyana Ali in 2019
Credit: Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
She went on to describe the care she received during her September 2016 delivery as “obstetric violence,” adding, “There are people… [who] have sued for almost the identical thing that happened to me and won.”
Ali explained that Edward’s birth was so traumatic that it required him to be placed in the neonatal intensive care unit for several days because he was unable to urinate on his own.
“I mean, I’ll be real with you… They pushed him back inside me,” she told host and fellow mom Danielle Fishel. “My baby was all the way crowned.”
Ali confirmed that the risky maneuver was “not a real procedure” and that, to this day, she’s still uncertain what caused her birth to spiral out of control so quickly.
“In my records, it shows that he goes from the lowest station I could — I saw his hair, I touched his hair — to the highest station, and it doesn’t say, well, how that happened,” she said. “It’s an incredibly dangerous thing that they did. They could have snapped his neck. But this is after hours of them holding me down, not allowing me to move.”
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The actress noted that her difficult delivery experience is “so common” among people of color. “It’s been happening for a very long time. The people who have spearheaded the reproductive justice movement have been ringing the alarm,” she said. “Black women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth. And I think a lot of times people go, ‘Oh, well, those are other health risks and other whatever.'”
She continued, “Yes, that’s in the mix of things. But there are incredible traumas that are also being experienced in the hospital when you’re a Black woman, an Indigenous person, giving birth. The treatment is just totally different — how they feel they can manipulate and touch you, and what they can do to your body, is just very different.”
Ali said that as soon as they were allowed, she, her son, and her husband, Vaughn Rasberry, checked out of the hospital. “We left in the middle of the night,” she recalled. “As soon as we got the go — I think it was like past midnight — we ran away.”
Ali and her husband welcomed a second child, their son Alejandro, in 2019. She has become a pregnancy health activist following Edward’s birth, helping to raise awareness about racial bias in health care.
Listen to Ali detail the delivery of her first son in the clip above.
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